Shandong Mama

Shop 7, 200 Bourke Street
Melbourne
VIC 3000

After hearing about their out of the ordinary dumplings we decided to check out Shandong Mama. It's in the Midcity arcade running between Bourke and Little Bourke near Russell.

It did a pretty good job for a mall based restaurant, with a modern fit out that worked well.

The menu's on the windows featured a range of dumplings, as well as some tapas style dishes and more full on mains.

We tried a couple of smaller dishes as well as some dumplings. The sweet and sour cabbage salad was flavoursome and refreshing.

The boiled 'Melbourne' dumplings came next...

These feature a mixture of chicken, fish, mussels, prawn and calamari with herbs in a thick house made skin, which all combined well.

We had to give the famed fried mackerel dumplings a try and these certainly looked the part with their crispy skin and unusual shape. We may have been expecting too much, but they weren't quite a flavoursome as we expected, but not nice enough anyway.

The fried eggplant stuffed with pork was a little bit too oily for us...

The service was efficient, and we enjoyed our meal. The bill came to $40, and I'd happily try a couple f the other dishes, but wasn't quite as impressed as I'd expected to be.

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Yummie Yum Cha

189-193 Barkly Street
Footscray
Victoria 3011

Despite being open for several years, we'd never got around to visiting Yummie Yum Cha. It had always looked a bit tired and empty inside, but on a recent evening after noticing it had been renovated and was looking a bit busier, we gave it a go.

Inside the bright chairs and banquettes certainly added some colour.

The wooden tables gave the place a nice feel.

The menu features plenty of dumplings, plus some bigger dishes takeaway is also available.

Although it was only moderately busy, it seem that the numbers were a bit much for the team on duty, but we eventually got to order.

The steamed prawn dumplings looked and tasted great.

The steamed scallop dumplings had only a thin topping of scallop with prawn beneath, but had the distinctive flavour.

The Chinese mushroom and vegetable buns had a hard to place, odd, overpowering flavour...

The steamed Peking style vegetarian dumplings had thick skins, but the filling was fine.

The stuffed eggplant with prawn was probably the winner here and my first taste of this dish.

We were thinking of ordering some more food as we were still a bit peckish, but couldn't get the attention of the waitress, so ended up paying at the counter, from where there is a good view into the kitchen. Overall the meal was fine, but let down by the service. Being pretty close to home we may give it another go, and hopefully they'll get used to handling what was a fairly modest level of custom!

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